As a small business owner focused on profits, looking at your daily to-do list can find you loaded down with many issues to tackle during your day. This can take you far off your primary profit course if you let it. After all, you have to handle customer service issues, respond to potential business ventures, deal with your team – and you have to be on your best game and impress your customers or clients with the best possible product, delivered with impeccable service, in an overall friendly environment, every day. You need to be positively memorable to all – from customers or clients, to your employees, right down to the vendors. How do you balance it all, and where are your priorities?
In the midst of this metaphorical baseball game, you are the batter who can hit any ball out of the park with confidence, until the ball coming toward you is the dreaded curveball. Let’s look at a curve ball example. One of your vendors tells you that your competition is thriving using a new technique that makes their products cost less, and thus they can freely offer a better price and attractive discounts. Underestimating the companies in your vertical or simply staying the course is a big mistake. Staying ahead of your competition is the only healthy state your business can be in.
Considering the condition of the economic recovery, I believe that it would be wiser to not be naïve, just realistic. I don’t see any other way but to capitalize on every opportunity sent your way, and also to look for opportunities that some of the competition’s weakness could offer you. A good start is by adopting a simple policy of routinely analyzing your competitors.
Pay attention to old and established competitors as well as the new ones. New players might appear very innocent at first, but they often turn into the nightmares you were avoiding in your dreams
. As an added bonus, new business might possess new strategies or technologies that could help your business thrive. Making a list of the competition’s strengths and weaknesses will provide you with the due diligence to know when to strike and when to step back and identify areas that need to be improved in your business. That is the game plan for small business success – and the path to bigger profits!
Being unpredictable will keep your competitors on the edge. Keep all your future moves locked in a safe. You will be able to pull them off with greater success, which will send larger waves of uncertainty to your competition. Constantly innovate; never stop due to fear. Terminate processes and systems that every competitor has already adopted. Go after every weakness you observe in competitors. Carefully watch your market and pocket the profits they will not have the ability or means to pull in.
Donna Marie Thompson, PhD
P.S.: For more information please here to get my Special Report: “3 Profit Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them.”
Remember – Just Say No to the Status Quo™
Donna Marie Thompson, PhD is a Small Business Profitability Expert and Founder of Expert Profit Solutions. She is a two-time best-selling author who has spent most of her career problem solving in international management consulting.
Donna Marie has helped businesses meet their profit targets under challenging circumstances. She was a Director at PricewaterhouseCooper's Consulting, and has worked at Booz Allen, as well as local consulting firms. This wide range of experience in businesses of all sizes uniquely qualifies Donna Marie to guide small businesses to discover their hidden profit potential.
Donna Marie earned a PhD from George Washington University, an MBA from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, a CPA in the state of Maryland, and is a Master Practitioner of the Energy Leadership Index.
Get your own copy of the free special report: "3 Profit Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them" at http://www.ExpertProfitSolutions.com .